10 Reasons Remote Teams Use Slack

Slack specializes in team communications, and it has experienced a surge of popularity over the past year. Slack’s CEO intends to be “the next Microsoft you want to use” said Wired. It’s a goal that may very well be accomplished with over $300 million in the bank.

Here are ten reasons you should be using Slack to manage your remote team’s messages.

1. Slack Works Across All Platforms Beautifully

Slack is one of the few applications that works well across all platforms without significant compromises as you move across ecosystems. None of its apps on Android, iOS, Mac, or even the Windows Phone fall below four-stars in user reviews. You can always be confident of two things with Slack:

They will have an app for all major platforms.

That app will work well.

It is obvious that Slack has a team of great designers and developers working behind all of its app initiatives.

2. Slack Lets You Send Messages Quickly

When working with a remote team, it is important that nothing impedes the flow of communication. Regardless of how often you get on video chats, impromptu chat storms will happen.

To format your messages on the fly, Slack supports MarkDown. If you have a tendency to make a lot of typos when writing messages quickly, simply press the up arrow on your keyboard to edit the last message you wrote. Slack also supports mentions within your messages.

4. Emojis are now Useful at Work

The rise of emojis has been startling. But in a work context, they are still frowned upon. That is until Slack introduced emoji reactions.

Emoji reactions allow you to attach emojis to any message in Slack. In some ways, they serve as a souped up version of Facebook’s like button. They can also serve as subtle acknowledgements and praise. Team Leaderboard even uses emoji reactions as a way to motivate its employees.

5. Slack is Always Updating

Slack is never too stagnant. While the core product typically stays the same, Slack does not appear to be afraid to change up how features work in order to improve the user experience. This is a far-cry from most enterprise team messaging apps, which almost adhere to stagnancy as a value.

6. The More Slacks the Merrier

As Slack grows in popularity for teams that are remote and non-remote, as well as online groups in general, it is not uncommon to be part of multiple Slack teams. In your Slack app, you can switch between multiple teams. On the desktop app, you can switch teams in your sidebar with keyboard shortcuts.

7. The Release Notes are Always Entertaining

While this isn’t so much of a benefit to you, the release notes for Slack app updates are always an entertaining read. Here is a short preview:

8. Slack is Actually Good at Twitter

There are a lot of companies that espouse the values of Twitter. There are a few that follow through on actually being good at Twitter. Slack is one of the few.

9. Slack is Fair About Its Pricing

While Slack is a bit expensive per user, they don’t have any interest in charging you for people who are inactive for on reason or another.

10. Yes, It Can Replace Your Internal Email

Email sucks for on-the-fly communication. But it has held an iron grip on communications for remote and physical office spaces for a long time. But Slack is the chink in email’s armor, and for many remote teams, it has virtually replaced email in every way with its easy-to-use UI and features such as document sharing.